Just Like Animals
Just Like Animals - John Eric Real Estate
Just like animals – No, I am not referring to FONZ (Friends of the National Zoo) or lyrics from a Maroon 5 song on the top 100. However, if you think about it, I am sure you will find allot of similarities between them and the political antics in our ever changing world of 2016.
As social media and advertising play a more integral role in the communication and persuasion of the upcoming elections, I was encouraged to look back through history and explore. My next question was how did a donkey and an elephant get looped into this whole process? Well, this is what I found out.
The Democratic Party’s donkey and the Republican Party’s elephant have been on the political scene since the 19th century. The origins of the Democratic donkey can be traced to the 1828 presidential campaign of Andrew Jackson. During that race, opponents of Jackson called him a jackass. However, rather than rejecting the label, Jackson, a hero of the War of 1812 – who later served in the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate, was amused by it and included an image of the animal in his campaign posters. Jackson went on to defeat incumbent John Quincy Adams and serve as America’s first Democratic president. Throughout the 1870s, Thomas Nast, who is considered the father of the modern political cartoons, helped popularize the donkey as a symbol for the entire Democratic Party.
The Republican Party was formed in 1854 and six years later Abraham Lincoln became its first member elected to the White House. In 1874, Thomas Nast invented yet another famous symbol—the Republican elephant. Appearing in a cartoon titled, “The Third-Term Panic,” in Harper’s Weekly, Nast drew a donkey clothed in lion’s skin, scaring away all the animals at the zoo. One of those animals, the elephant, was labeled “The Republican Vote.” This was enough to recruit the elephant as the symbol of the party. As if it wasn’t enough, Nast continued to employ the elephant to represent Republicans in additional cartoons throughout the 1870s, and by 1880 other cartoonists were using the creature to symbolize the party.
David Brown